This Time:
Neoconservatism Redux

James Neuchterlein

I made a vow, after finishing my May column on "The End of
Neoconservatism," that this was, for me, the end of
neoconservatism. Like most writers, I try to avoid repeating myself, and
yet over the years I have written so often on that subject that now
merely to think of it induces acute glazed-eye syndrome. No more, I
pledged. Better, say, an in-depth retrospective on the lost
opportunities of the Law of the Sea Treaty. Better an analysis of
monetary trends in Gabon. Better anything.

Then I ran across Mark Gerson's The Neoconservative Vision
(Madison, 368 pp., $26.95), which he has supplemented with a
collection of classic neocon essays, The Essential Neoconservative
Reader (Addison-Wesley, 467 pp., $27.50). Someone in the office
suggested that I review the Gerson volumes, both as a student of the
movement and as an occasional participant in its activities. (Gerson,
who has read everything that every neoconservative has ever written,
cites me a handful of times.) When our beloved Editor-in-Chief seconded
the motion, I reluctantly agreed. Thus one last (this time I really mean
it) encounter with the neoconservative experience.

The first thing to be said about The Neoconservative Vision is
how good it is. Gerson has not only read everything on his subject, he
has thoroughly absorbed, synthesized, and analyzed what he has read.
(This is the more impressive because he is so young: he graduated from
Williams College-where the book began as an honors project-in 1994, and
he is currently in law school at Yale.) There are some minor errors of
fact, a few questionable interpretations, and too many typos, but for
the most part the book gets things right.

Gerson traces the neoconservative impulse from its prehistory in the
liberal anticommunism of the fifties through its particular origins as a
reaction against the radicalizing of liberalism in the sixties to its
flourishing thereafter as a defense of American bourgeois democratic
culture against its various critics on the left. Along the way he lays
out with admirable clarity neoconservative positions on affirmative
action, student radicalism, Israel, capitalism, government regulation,
multiculturalism, religion, the family, and much, much else. (The essays
collected in The Essential Neoconservative Reader provide an
illustrative sampling of the literary flair and polemical zest of the
leading neoconservative writers.)

All this is by now well-traveled territory for many of us, but Gerson
provides a useful map and serves as a reliable guide to those unfamiliar
with the terrain. And his coverage is so thorough that even veterans of
the neoconservative wars will find themselves reminded on occasion of
half-forgotten skirmishes and forays.

Particularly useful is Gerson's specification of the constituting
notions underlying neoconservatism. He identifies four fundamental
principles: 1) Life and politics are infinitely complex, so beware of
utopian schemes and large-scale ventures in social engineering; 2) Human
nature is mixed, and the political order cannot be arranged on the
assumption of altruism (as Reinhold Niebuhr put it, "Man's capacity for
justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice
makes democracy necessary"); 3) Man is a social animal, which is to say
that communities make claims on individual autonomy and that "freedom is
an essential good, but it must serve the larger end of societal virtue";
4) Ideas rule the world, and "a society that does not have the self-
confidence to defend its principles will fall prey to the forces intent
on subverting or altering those principles." Others might add to that
list of first principles or elaborate them in somewhat different ways,
but I suspect that few neoconservatives would have any fundamental
quarrel with Gerson's outline.

Gerson concedes that the neoconservatives no longer exist as a distinct
movement, but he records their demise as their triumph: "Their
ideological development over the past fifty years has culminated in what
we now identify as American conservatism; in that sense, they have been
so successful that it is now appropriate to drop the prefix 'neo' from
their appellation." That, I think, is rather too triumphalist a
judgment. A number of conservative intellectuals (most prominently
William F. Buckley, Jr.) might legitimately quarrel with the implication
that conservatism owes its ascendancy simply to the neocons.

Beyond that, the neoconservative drift to the right over time is not
quite the unproblematic stately procession Gerson describes. Indeed, his
own list of thirty-nine prominent neoconservative intellectuals includes
at least three figures-Daniel Bell, Martin Peretz, and Daniel Patrick
Moynihan-who either never joined the movement or who at some point
defected from it because of disagreements over its political direction.
That doesn't mean they were right, of course (I don't think they were),
but it does complicate the story.

My own sense is that a number of neoconservatives found themselves
thoroughly surprised-and in some cases somewhat unsettled-at how far to
the right their political journey had led from its beginnings in the
mid-sixties. Gerson does not note that neoconservatism's first political
manifestation was as the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, and most
neoconservatives entertained hopes of reclaiming the Democratic Party
and mainstream liberalism for their cause long after those hopes had
lost touch with political reality. Even as they for so long insisted,
against the evidence, that they were neoliberals rather than
neoconservatives, so they went to quite extraordinary lengths to avoid
identification as Republicans. I know of neoconservatives who have voted
Republican for two decades who remain registered as Democrats. (On these
matters, Irving Kristol, the leading neoconservative, was notably
unrepresentative.)

This reluctance to admit being what they were was part political and
intellectual habit, part ethnic heritage. Most of the leading
neoconservatives were Jewish (only fourteen of Gerson's thirty-nine
prominent neoconservatives are non-Jews) and Jews found it
extraordinarily difficult to think of themselves as conservatives, much
less Republicans. In the American context, to be a Jew-even more a
Jewish intellectual-was to be a person of the left. Norman Podhoretz's
working title for his memoir Breaking Ranks was A Traitor
to My Class. Many Jews on the left considered him a traitor to his
religion as well. (The same pressures existed, though to a much lesser
extent, among Catholic neoconservatives.)

For most neoconservatives, then-Irving Kristol again excepted-the move
from left to right was personally and intellectually wrenching. And
those who made it often had the zeal of converts. That imbued the
movement with energy and enthusiasm. It also made it acutely sensitive
to signs of ideological backsliding.

Neoconservatism was not always the tidy and seamless affair Gerson
depicts. There was more intramural bickering among its adherents than he
records. There was also, among some of them, a greater concern for
purity of doctrine than he seems aware of. Perhaps you had to be there:
I recall attending neoconservative functions during the 1980s and being
struck by the extent and intensity of criticism of the Reagan
Administration for its ideological unreliability. (The Bush presidency,
at least in its last two years, elicited only general contempt.) Like
most intellectuals, neoconservatives had little patience for the
inevitable-and necessary-compromises of politics.

But whatever its marginal flaws, neoconservatism was, in my view, a
great and good cause. It mounted a spirited and sophisticated defense of
the American social order against the utopian and rage-filled assaults
of its radical critics-a defense that, to its great shame, the
mainstream liberal community found itself unable or unwilling to
provide. Neoconservatives were derided by their enemies for their
nostalgia for the "American celebration" of the postwar years. Most of
them did not take that criticism as an insult.

Neoconservatism was also a grand adventure. Gerson quotes George Weigel:
"There is a kind of Henry V quality about all this. 'We few, we happy
few, we band of brothers.' I mean, that really is true. [We are] people
who have been together in a great moral cause. . . . It just forms very
lasting bonds of affection." For an understanding of the neoconservative
adventure, Mark Gerson's two books provide an excellent place to start.